Competing for Customers: Why Delivering Business Outcomes is Critical in the Customer First Revolution

2. Making the Case for Customer Success

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

—Sam Walton

In the preceding chapter, we described two meta trends that are shaping the new economy—namely, the Customer First Revolution and the Subscription Economy. We argued that to stay ahead of these trends—indeed, to harness them—business will need to embrace a radically new way of thinking about customers, one informed by a set of principles and techniques we call customer success delivery.

We define customer success delivery as the ability to develop and deploy business practices that target, track, and measure customer success with the goal of ...